A Niantic executive said that he “could definitely see” governments and militaries purchasing the company’s newly announced AI model for navigating the real world, which would be based on scan data generated by Pokémon Go players, but that if the use case is specific to the military and “adding amplitude to war, then that’s definitely an issue.”
The comment was made by Brian McClendon, Niantic’s Senior Vice President of Engineering and formerly the co-creator of Google Earth, Street View, and Google Maps, at the investigative journalism group Bellingcat’s Bellingfest event on November 14. McClendon was giving a talk titled “Coordinates of tomorrow: Why spatial computing needs a new map,” which covered his history in the industry, his work at Google and Niantic, and some details on Niantic’s Large Geospatial Model, or LGM, that the company announced two days earlier.
During a questions and answers portion after his talk, Bellingcat’s open source analyst and ex-British Army officer Nick Waters said that LGMs would be “unbelievably useful” to the military and asked if McClendon could see governments and militaries purchase LGMs from Niantic.